Ricky Bellamy is shot in the head by a vigilante at the corner
of Geneva and Mission in San Francisco. He's declared brain-dead and
hooked up to life support, but ten months later he emerges from his
coma. The bullet stays lodged in his head--inoperable, the doctors
say--but with it comes what Ricky calls "visions, a third eye."

A stunning work of speculative noir, Dirty in Cashmere follows
Ricky through the ravaged San Francisco of the near-future, a city
dealing with the fall-out from a nuclear disaster in Japan, after which
massive contamination spread across the Pacific Ocean to California.
He's set adrift in a world in which Life--the street name of an
experimental radiation vaccine--is the currency by which both criminal
enterprises and survival are won. As he squats in abandoned houses and
brands himself as an "oracle" who can see the future--first for
nefarious purposes, then for more noble ones--Ricky wonders whether
there isn't a bigger picture out there, one that maybe he can't focus on
or perhaps one that someone's hiding from him. And as his skills as an
oracle are called upon by more powerful forces, it becomes clear that
the one thing Ricky wants most to predict--his own future--is the only
thing impervious to his newfound insights.

About Peter Plate

Named a Literary Laureate of San Francisco in 2004, PETER
PLATE taught himself to write fiction during eight years spent squatting
in abandoned buildings. He is the author of many novels, beginning
with Black Wheel of Anger (1990) and continuing through his seven neo-noir "psychic histories" of San Francisco, where he still lives and writes today.